Talking to Richard Dooling about doctors, lawyers, and
"looking-around men" in Sierra Leone, West Africa...

Does fiction imitate reality or does reality mock fiction? Rick
Dooling had to ponder that
question just after he turned in the manuscript for his new novel,
White Man's Grave, to
be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 1994. In White
Man's Grave, Boone
Westfall ventures into the heart of Sierra Leone, West Africa, after
receiving word that his
childhood friend--Michael Killigan--now a Peace Corps volunteer there,
has disappeared. Has
he been kidnaped by rebels in the area? Is he still alive? To find out,
Boone gets caught up
in the communal life of a primitive village, one pervaded by a complex
belief in witches,
fetishes, bush devils, swears and counterswears. Dooling himself had spent
seven months in just
such a village, visiting his real-life friend. Then, shortly after he completed
White Man's Grave, he received a call from his friend's mother telling
him that "Mike has disappeared
from his village. We think he may have been abducted by Liberian rebels."
It was almost as
if Dooling had written the script for him!

"I started to think I might have actually caused it to happen," says
Dooling with a laugh. In his
novel, one of the characters is accused of being a witch. Would the real
village in Sierra Leone
have suspected the author of witchcraft? Perhaps. "They might have
accused me of causing
Mike's disappearance by praying over that fetish I call a novel," he
quips. "Anyone who talks
about witchcraft--or, in this case, writes about it--is suspect." Luckily,
Dooling's friend was
released unharmed several weeks later.

"White Man's Grave is an outrageously funny satire about
doctors, lawyers, insurance
salesmen, and primitive magic," says John Glusman, Dooling's editor at
FSG. These are worlds
that Dooling knows a lot about. He is an ex-attorney and a former
registered respiratory
therapist who cared for critically ill patients in intensive care units.
In fact, his first novel, Critical Care, took aim at high-tech
health care in ICUs, the dark, gallows-style humor that
often pervades there, and the inhuman burdens often placed on hospital staff.

In Dooling's Sierra Leone--often called "the white man's grave"
because of the diversity there
of disease-carrying microbes and parasites that can attack the immune
system--doctors, clad in
antiseptic whites are conspicuously absent. Instead, there are
"looking-around men." Are
"looking-around men" witch doctors? Not exactly. "They're part private
investigators, part
clairvoyants, part psychiatrist, and, probably, part con-men," says Dooling.
In his book, a
"looking-around man" and a "witch-finder" are called in by villagers when
witchcraft and other
evil are suspected. Today, Dooling keeps a Sierra Leonean batik painting
of a "looking-around
man" on his office wall.

Other Sierra Leonean customs sometimes have more dire
consequences. White Man's Grave describes, in one scene, a
ritual female circumcision. In another scene the author
describes something he himself witnessed: an infant is force-fed cassava
pap until his belly is
hard, a widespread practice which sometimes ends in babies choking to
death. But, as strange
as some of these things may seem, Dooling reminds us that such traditions
have existed for
thousands of years. Interfering with them poses a moral dilemma that
Dooling's characters must
face.

A contrasting part of the novel is set in Indianapolis, where the missing
volunteer's father,
Randall Killigan, is a ruthless bankruptcy lawyer. He receives a horrible
African fetish in the
mail, and thereafter, strange things begin to happen....Has he been invaded
by a vengeful
witch's evil spirit? Or was he the perfect host-body for evil, to begin with?
Do bad medicine
and magic really exist? "One of the themes of White Man's Grave."
says Dooling, "is
that whether one believes in African witchcraft, American medicine, or the
bankruptcy code, the material world often conforms itself to those
beliefs and not vice versa."

Dooling will occasionally still write legal briefs for clients or other
lawyers on a freelance basis
but he doesn't miss being a full-time lawyer. "Litigation is intellectual
warfare. It is often
savage and malicious," says Dooling. "You do your best to 'harm' the
other side in much the
same way an African villager tries to harm an enemy using bad medicine
or witchcraft. The
metaphors litigators use are often warlike and violent: 'I'm going wipe
the floor with them,
bloody their noses, give the witness a coronary on the stand, etc."

Does he plan to return to Sierra Leone at some point? He has no plans
to, although his friend,
who married a Sierra Leonean woman and is presently living in Buffalo,
New York, wants to
return with his wife and children. "He's waiting now for a new Red Cross
assignment which
will allow him to go back to Africa and remain for at least several years."
He adds, "Sierra
Leone is a beautiful place. Unfortunately, everyone there has given up on
government." When
Boone Westfall catches up with his buddy in the book, he finds that he is
in the hands of some
dangerous teenaged Sierra Leonean rebels. "Liberia and Sierra Leone are
being run by fourteen-year-olds with machine guns," says Dooling.
"But you can see why
that's happened. They
watched their fathers die in the diamond mines and their farms get
flooded, while corrupt
government ministers smuggle the country's wealth across porous
borders."--Farrar, Straus, & Giroux